Tony Abbott delivered a stinging rebuke to George Brandis’s criticism of the conservatives within the Liberal party.
Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

A war of words has broken out between the former prime minister Tony Abbott and Australia’s new high commissioner in London, George Brandis, with the two duking it out over simmering tensions within the Coalition between small-l liberals and conservatives.

In an interview with Fairfax, Brandis said conservatives were engaged in a hostile takeover of the Liberal party, and the new high commissioner made a direct observation on Abbott’s leadership.

“Abbott’s leadership was probably the only time that the Liberal party in government pursued a set of policies so ideologically right wing,” Brandis said, noting Abbott’s reluctance to embrace multiculturalism was “out of sync” with modern Australian values, as was his opposition to same-sex marriage.

Abbott wasted no time in responding, accusing his former cabinet colleague of beginning his diplomatic career with a “partisan attack that rewrites history”.

Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR)

George Brandis has begun his ambassadorship with a partisan attack that rewrites history. How could the Liberal Party under my leadership have been "ideologically right-wing" when I had him as part of the leadership group?

The new high commissioner styled the current prime minister Malcolm Turnbull as the contemporary embodiment of the liberal tradition created by the long-serving prime minister Robert Menzies, and noted John Howard was the first leader to bring “the conservative influence to bear”.

Brandis, a Liberal moderate, became increasingly vocal in public during the closing stage of his political career about the importance of the party maintaining its liberal traditions.

The former attorney general took a public swipe at the One Nation leader Pauline Hanson when she entered the Senate chamber dressed in a burqa, and he used his parting speech from federal parliament to observe that “powerful elements of right-wing politics” had abandoned the liberal tradition in favour of “a belligerent, intolerant populism which shows no respect for either the rights of individual citizens or the traditional institutions which protect them”.

In implicit criticism of his Queensland conservative colleague Peter Dutton, Brandis noted as a parting shot: “I have not disguised my concern at attacks upon the institutions of the law – the courts and those who practice in them. To attack those institutions is to attack the rule of law itself.”

The party is battling bruising factional warfare between moderates and conservatives behind the scenes in several states, including New South Wales and Victoria.

In Victoria, the conservative faction secured 13 of 19 seats on the party’s powerful administrative committee in late April, and has been recruiting from church groups.

With internal tensions running high, the Herald Sun obtained a recording of Victorian conservative and assistant minister to the treasurer, Michael Sukkar, saying “socialists” had infiltrated the Liberal party.

“The last bastion, the last vestige of conservatism, which is the Liberal party, is the last institution that they’re trying to get their way into,” Sukkar reportedly said. “And, like termites, they’ll get in and they’ll eat us from the inside out unless we do something”.